2008

Getting Started with Drupal

Getting Started with Drupal (a.k.a. Drupal4LITA Bootcamp) Preconference, June 27th, 2008 Anaheim Public Library Cary Gordon of the Cherry Hill Company, a vendor specializing in support of open source software, gave an extremely detailed introduction to Drupal 6.2, the latest version of the open source content management system. The attendees came from a variety of library types, including academic, public, and special, and with a variety of experience levels with the system. Flash drives with the XAMPP server/database combination pre-installed were distributed along with the components for a Drupal installation. The morning focused on setting up Apache, the MySQL database, some PHP settings, and a basic install of Drupal. The afternoon covered modules (the building blocks of a Drupal site), user permissions, basic content creation, and an introduction to Drupal’s specialized vocabulary: nodes, taxonomies, menus, blocks. The program concluded with an excellent list of Drupal-related resources available on the web….

2008

Building and supporting Koha

Building and Support Koha, an open-source ILS Saturday June 28th, 2008, 10:30-12:00 Hyatt Regency Orange County John Houser, Senior Technology Consultant for PALINET, and Johsua Ferraro, CEO of Liblime, set out to answer common questions about open-source ILS systems with a focus on Liblime’s support for Koha. The format was an interview, and the resulting questions and answers were recorded. Watch for a link to the podcast version here. Representative questions and answers follow, but these are only samples of an extremely rich discussion of general and very specific technical details. Cost Don’t necessarily plan to save lots of money on an open-source ILS, as planning to contribute to development efforts has many advantages–primarily that you get to set the priorities for new features in the ILS. A representative of a Koha library in the audience pointedly disagreed, stressing that in his case there were significant cost savings. How does…

2008

Open Source Legal Issues

Monday, June 30th, 2008 Hyatt Regency Orange County Walt Scacchi of UC-Irvine stepped in as a last-minute replacement speaker for Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center and gave a talk entitled “Research Results for Free/Open Source Software Development: Best Practices for Libraries? (and some legal issues too)” based on his empirical research on open-source project processes, practices, and community development . The talk was rich in details on who open-source developers are and what they do. Using the current stats at Sourceforge as a starting point, he estimated approximately 180,000 current open-source software projects, of which approximately 18,000 (10%) are currently being succesfully developed. The largest area of open-source development is in games, in large part driven by the fact that the very successful Sony game systems are built using open-source software. Open-source developers tend to use the tools they build, which is not necessarily the case for…